Penumbra Read online

  She put out a priority call to the Bombay, Madras and Delhi police forces to forward details of the manufacture and sale of sabline suits over the past ten years. Then she downloaded the report of her findings to Vishwanath’s terminal, marked urgent.

  She sat back and considered what to do next.

  Rana went through, step by step, what she had done so far, the leads she had examined and the people she had interviewed. The computer system, programmed to flag any significant correlation of fact, no matter how coincidental, had come up with nothing. It was down to the power of the brain, an individual’s ability to think laterally, to move the case forward. That, or pure blind luck.

  She sat up. She recalled her earlier thought that the killer might be an off-worlder. If the sabline came from Madrigal, then perhaps - it was a long shot, she knew - perhaps so did the killer. If, that was, the killer was the Man in the Black Suit.

  She opened her com-screen and accessed internal files. She logged on to the colonial crime file and typed in the key words: Madrigal, Laser Charge, Crucifix. She gave a fifteen-year remit and waited, expecting to be deluged with thousands of files that would take hours to sift through.

  Minutes later her screen flashed with the message that only ten murder files awaited her inspection online.

  She downloaded them into her com-screen and called them up one by one. Madrigal, it appeared, was a tiny planet with a population of only three million citizens, mainly miners, space line workers and scientists. Seven of the ten murders involving laser charges had been solved, the perpetrators tried and sentenced. Two cases were awaiting trial, with the accused pleading guilty. That left one case, the seemingly motiveless murder of a psychiatric patient almost fifteen years ago. The killer had never been apprehended, even though an eye witness to the killing had provided a description of the alleged murderer.

  Now this was more interesting. Rana requested the computer-generated image of the suspect, sat back and waited.

  A minute later the image filled her screen. Rana stared at the thin-faced, dark-haired man, something sickeningly confident and self-assured about his expression, though she reminded herself that it was only a computer-generated image. He was Caucasian, aged perhaps thirty in the pix - which would make him forty-five now - and other information supplied by the witness suggested that he was just under six feet tall and of athletic build. The witness had not noticed the suspected killer’s clothing.

  Rana sent a copy of the pix through to Vishwanath’s terminal, suggesting that they should put out a request for a search and detention order to all forces.

  She made a copy of the pix, propped it on her desk and stared at the dark, handsome face for a long time. She wondered if the reason she thought the face looked familiar was because, to her, Western faces did tend to share certain similar characteristics. How many bronzed, finely chiselled male faces had she seen on holodramas over the years?

  But there was something about this face . . .

  She told herself to be sensible. She had concentrated on the crucifix killings so intently over the last month that she was becoming obsessed.

  She looked at the big digital clock on the wall. It was nearly ten o’clock, way past the time her shift finished. She killed her screen, said goodbye to Varma, and left the building.

  The orange glow-tubes of the street-vendors illuminated the rain-slicked street. A constant procession of traffic surged back and forth, horns blaring in a mindless concerto of futility. Rana walked briskly through the humid night. She was still energised from concentrating on the case, and she knew that sleep would be a long time coming.

  She hadn’t seen the kids down at the Howrah bridge for over a month - what better way to empty her mind of the day’s events than to chat with Vandita and her friends over a chai?

  She took a cab to the Ganges, paid the driver and crossed the pavement to the railings overlooking the broad sweep of the water. The tide was out, revealing a slick expanse of mud-flats. Stick-thin figures in dhotis and vests waded up to their knees in the estuarine silt, poking about with long poles for who knew what. From beneath the arching span of the Howrah bridge, Rana heard the echo of children’s voices and laughter, and she was reminded of the spirit of community and camaraderie she had missed for so long.

  Of all the children she had worked with over the years, in every part of the city, she had an affinity with the Howrah bridge kids most of all. There were many reasons for this: the self-help and co-operative scheme she had set up here a couple of years ago was still running successfully; the twelve-year-old Brahmin girl who organised the children, Vandita, reminded her so much of herself; and once she too had made her home between the steel pillars on the bridge’s northern bank. Now the kids would be gathering there after a hard day’s work, pooling their money, sending out for daal bhat and chai, gathering around the fire for a few hours of chatter before one by one they fell asleep.

  Rana moved to the bridge and peered into the shadows. A flickering fire illuminated a circle of brown faces and bright eyes.

  Vandita saw her and leapt to her feet. ‘Rana-ji!’ she cried. ‘Where have you been?’

  Rana felt a stab of guilt. ‘I’ve been promoted, Vandita. I didn’t want the job, but I couldn’t refuse.’

  Soon they were milling around her. They touched her uniform and the polished butt of her pistol protruding from beneath her jacket, as if it were some kind of talisman or good luck charm. Vandita took her hand and dragged her into the makeshift home beneath the bridge. They had laid boards on stones clear of the mud, covered the wooden slats with scraps of carpet and cloth, and had even found mattresses and old charpoys to sleep on. The three enclosing sides, two steel pillars and the brick wall, were hung with garish pix of Hindu gods, Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesh, alongside holodrama stars and skyball players. They even had a big, battered tea pot bubbling on a brazier.

  Rana removed her boots and sat down on a mattress, her back against a pillar.

  ‘Chai, Rana?’ Vandita asked.

  A chipped mug was pressed into her hand, full of sickly sweet, spiced chai. She looked around the beaming faces. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t called for such a long time,’ she said in Hindi. ‘Any problems?’

  ‘The people who clean the bridge want us to move,’ Vandita reported. ‘We said we’d move out until the bridge is cleaned, and then move back in. But they’re not happy with this. They want us to go for good. They say we dirty the bridge, but this isn’t true.’

  ‘Have you told Private Khosla?’ Rana asked. ‘He’ll talk to the authorities and come to some arrangement.’

  Vandita avoided her gaze. The other children looked unhappy.

  ‘What? You have seen Khosla, haven’t you?’

  ‘He came once only,’ Vandita said, jogging her head from side to side. ‘He told us that the money for our cleaning equipment - the subsidy you gave us - is to be cut. Now we get twenty rupees per month only, instead of fifty.’

  ‘But he can’t do that!’ Rana looked around the staring faces, feeling guilty herself for Khosla’s duplicity. ‘I’ll talk to him immediately, Vandita.’

  A young boy in soiled shorts and a small vest said, ‘When the officer came down, he had his nose in the air. We invited him in for chai’ - he put his thumb to his lips in the gesture for drinking - ‘but he wouldn’t join us. The look on his face said that we smelled. He’s like all the other cops.’ He looked away from Rana’s gaze.

  She pulled a fifty-rupee note from her pocket and passed it to Vandita. ‘For food,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to Khosla and get your money restored, ah-cha?’

  Khosla was doing what officers had done for years before him: appropriating funds meant for elsewhere. If he was taking over fifty per cent of all the money spent on schemes meant to help the street-kids across the city, then he would be earning more than his actual wages. Khosla had probably assumed that she would cease her association with the kids as soon as she was promoted; no doubt he could not conceive of why anyone migh
t seek their company. She would quietly tell him that she knew what he was doing, and that if it didn’t stop she would inform his superiors.

  ‘But you, Rana!’ a young girl called Priti asked. ‘Tell us about all your adventures!’

  ‘How many murderers have you caught? Tell us!’

  So she made up stories of car chases and shoot-outs, evil gang-lords and robbers, rather than disillusion them with the truth, that ninety-nine per cent of police work was boring administration.

  She sipped her third cup of chai and listened to their stories. Each child had a tale to tell, exaggerated epics of how they had been chased, robbed, beaten - but she knew that most of these adventures were imaginary. She had told the same tall tales years ago to while away the hours before sleep.

  One small boy said, ‘A holostar outside the Tata studios gave me twenty rupees! But then a drunken yar came and snatched it from me! I yelled and screamed, but where are the cops when you need them?’

  The children laughed. They were forever complaining about the police, with justification, and smiling at Rana as they did so. She took as a compliment the fact that they no longer saw her as an officer of the law.

  Midnight came and went and the brazier burned low. The children slipped quietly to sleep, the younger ones first, curling up where they lay on scraps of carpet or, if they were lucky, on old mattresses. The older children fought to keep awake, but long hours working on the streets, and the prospect of early starts at dawn, soon had them snoring.

  Rana shifted her position on the mattress. She was warm and comfortable, and enjoyed the strange feeling of being safe among people she knew and trusted.

  Carefully, so as not to wake the sleeping children, Vandita moved to her side and leaned against her. Rana stroked the matted tangle of the girl’s rosewater-scented hair.

  ‘Are you happy, Vandita?’ she whispered.

  The girl nodded beneath Rana’s hand. ‘I have friends, now, Rana. Life is hard, but I have friends.’

  ‘At first it is hard,’ Rana said. ‘Everything is new, and you are never trusted because of what you left behind. They say, “How can you want to live like us? How can you turn your back on what you had?” But they don’t understand that sometimes wealth and privilege can be terrible for the heart. In time things get better - you win their trust and they see you are just like them.’

  She looked down at the girl curled by her side, but Vandita was asleep.

  Rana stretched comfortably on the mattress and stared out from under the bridge at the silvered expanse of the Ganges, the ripples from the wakes of passing boats slicing the reflection of the full moon into shimmering ribbons.

  It seemed such a long time ago now, a lifetime away, but at the age of ten she had been so unhappy. She had attended an expensive school with pupils from all over the world, and in a class of fifteen girls she had not one friend. She supposed it was her fault. She was small and quiet and cripplingly shy; in company she would have to screw her courage up to speak, and then it would come out too quickly, or the timing would be wrong, so that by the time she had thought of something to say the topic of conversation had moved on. She was never bullied, but sometimes she wished she had been, because then someone might have stood up to protect her, and she would have had a friend.

  But if school was bad, then her life at home was even worse. She lived in a big house to the west of the city, with a big garden, and she had her own rooms and all the latest toys. She was looked after by an unsmiling nanny, a big woman with rough hands who hurt her when washing her hair or scrubbing her back, and showed her not the slightest sign of affection, or even friendship. She had heard other girls at school talk about how their nannies took them to holodramas and restaurants, but her nanny performed the bare minimum of duties for her weekly wage, and then abandoned her to her own devices.

  Perhaps she could have tolerated the apathy of her nanny if her mother and father had shown her any affection. They were distant, monarchic figures she saw briefly - perhaps once a week. Her father was something to do with space exploration, and was often away in the colonies. He was like a stranger to her, and when he did return from the stars and pick her up and play with her briefly and insist she call him by his name, the forced and artificial quality of his affection pointed up the total lack of it the rest of the time. As for her mother . . . She had hated her mother even more, because there was no excuse for her lack of love. She was always somewhere in the house, arranging parties or working on this or that committee matter. She seemed to go out of her way to ignore Rana. She was not actively cruel - Rana had no stories of sadistic torture or punishment - but in a way her lack of connection was crueller still.

  She had known at ten that she could not continue this way of life, but an alternative seemed impossible. She lost herself in books and holodramas, but these were temporary respites from a way of life she wanted to escape totally.

  She had the idea one day when, driven by the family chauffeur to school, she had seen a gaggle of street-kids, scruffy tousle-haired urchins, playing kabbadi on the pavement. When eliminated from the contest they sat watching the game, arms about each other with unforced affection, laughing. They had nothing, she realised, and yet they had everything that she did not.

  Two days later she joined them on the streets, having discarded her new clothes for a patched, thin dress belonging to her nanny’s daughter and rubbed soil into her face and hair. They had asked her name, and rather than say that she was Sita Mackendrick, daughter of the millionaire owner of the Mackendrick Foundation, she had made up a name on the spur of the moment: Rana Rao.

  They had been suspicious of her, of course, wary of her precise way with words and her command of English, her fair skin that came as a result of having an American father, and the first few days had been hard. She had had to face taunts and jibes about her prissy manners and fastidiousness when it came to eating whatever scraps the others brought back, but she had found even in their laughing criticism a vital contact she had never known before. And in time, when they came to trust her and rely on her quick wits and even quicker tongue, they had shown friendship that made her weep with the joy of belonging.

  She knew she had found true friends when, after perhaps a week of living in a derelict factory, the kids made her stay behind one day rather than join them begging on the streets. They had showed her a pix of herself - a prim, privileged self she hardly recognised - and said that police patrols were looking for her. They even moved themselves to another, distant part of the city for a month, until the search abated. Life was difficult: she often went hungry and was sometimes cold, and the ground made a hard and uncomfortable bed. But she became accustomed to hardship in time, and it was a small price to pay for the constant companionship of her new family.

  One day, begging on the streets, she had caught sight of her mother through the window of an expensive restaurant, and this vision of a rich, sophisticated woman inhabiting another world had made her realise how right she had been to get away.

  Now, Rana sat up, dislodging Vandita, and stared out into the darkness. That day her mother had been with another man, not her husband. The man had seemed to be comforting her. Her mother had been weeping, and he had reached out and touched her hand.

  The man, Rana thought now, looked very much like the computer-generated image of the killer from Madrigal - but then so did many other handsome, dark-haired Westerners. She knew that the similarity in this case had to be a coincidence. She lay back and closed her eyes.

  She had lived with the street-kids for four years - the last year spent under this very bridge - until begging for food became more difficult: people were reluctant to give money to older children, who they thought should be working for a living. Some of her friends had drifted into prostitution, but Rana had seen how abused these kids were, how their pimps took most of their money and their customers beat them.

  One day Rana had read an advertisement requesting students to sit a police academy examination. T
hinking only of the rupees she might one day earn, Rana had bought forged high-school certificates and enrolled. To her amazement she had passed the examination, and one year later began working as Calcutta’s only Child Welfare officer. For eight years she had worked to improve the conditions of the kids who made the streets their home, give them skills, in some cases professions, so that when they reached puberty they might find other means than prostitution to earn a wage.

  Rana lay on the mattress beside Vandita. She was ten again, and living on the streets . . . She wondered where those kids were now, her friends for brief months or years. They had all grown up and drifted apart, in adulthood. She considered these children her friends, now.

  Rana smiled to herself and wondered what some casual observer might make of the tableau, as she drifted to sleep beside Vandita and the other kids in the fading glow of the brazier.